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CHAPTER THREE

When shall it be built?

25. When to pick the site

A few pages ago I got in ahead of schedule by talking about when to look for your site. I said that a late fall search permits planning in winter, building in spring, with time left for the children to get ready for school in their new town.

This is your best program if you are in a hurry. Most people, probably including you, are in a hurry once they decide to build a house.

It is not the best of all possible programs. Construction of your house immediately following purchase of the site may be necessary, but a slower schedule has its advantages.

Most people go about it this way. They dream about their house, look at magazines, clip out pictures, ask advice, doodle with floor plans, ask more advice, and save their money. When they can stand the dream no longer, they dash out to find a place to put it. The hammers are clattering before the ink on their deed is dry.

I say--to pick a number--that you should own your land, if possible, for at least two years before you start to build. There are many reasons.

AVAILABILITY. It's a pity we weren't all born a generation sooner. The planet is filling up. Every day there is less of it left for each of us. Good places to live within driving distance of Nemo City grow constantly harder to find.

We didn't ask to be born, and it isn't our fault we were born a little late, but it is our fault if we persist in the notion that there will be more and better places to live tomorrow. There won't. They get worse.

VALUE. As I said before, the value of a good piece of land, barring unusual circumstance, always goes up, never down. I said value, not price. In the constantly moving inflated price areas, which we already have agreed to avoid, anything can happen.

Since the value will go up, you can safely buy land and sit on it, while your plans, family, profession, prospects, and, of course, bank roll, mature. You don't have to wait to be sure. If the plans change, you can turn a nice profit and start over somewhere else.

Unfortunately, by next year you will be paying that same profit to someone else. A desirable site, even if it remains available, will cost you more next year than this.

INSTALLMENT BUYING. I keep bringing up the notion that it is easier, better, and cheaper to approach your total estate by easy stages, rather than trying to swallow it, washed down by a long-term mortgage, in one gulp. We have talked about installment building.

Lots of people forget that the price of the land is added to the price of the house, whether bought together or separately. Therefore getting the land bought and paid for is a form of installment buying. It eases the strain later on.

FAMILIARITY. It costs a lot less to go along with nature than it does to fight her. Yet to go along with nature we must get to know her, and she is as whimsical as a schoolgirl. She changes from week to week, season to season. Even the general pattern of a year does not repeat itself.

That patch of level ground which, seen in the fall, looks good for the garden, may turn into a swamp next spring. And where do the wild-flowers grow? You might have been planning your driveway right through a priceless patch of wild orchids.

What trees come in leaf first? Which ones filter the light, and which give dense shade? What color are the lilacs, purple, white, or in between, and how soon are they gone? When do the grape leaves get big? Which of those old vines can be pruned and brought to bear? Are the birches white or gray? Will they show blight in a dry season?

What does a storm do when it comes from the west? Or from the east? Where does the snow melt first? Where does it leave an ice cover in the shade? Does that flowing spring dry up in the summer, and does that mudhole over there stay muddy all year round? Does the road gutter overflow in a heavy rain, and if so, where does the water go? If I dig a hole here, will I be digging in loam, gravel, sand, clay, water, or rocks?

You have bought your site, and you love it, but you don't really know it yet. I suggest that if your circumstances will permit a long courtship, a two-year get-acquainted time should provide most of the answers.

THE SUN. Much has been said in these pages about the importance of sun orientation. I have drawn sketches all over the place with arrows saying North, Sunrise, Sunset. More sketches have shown sun angle in summer, winter, morning, evening, ten o'clock and three.

I said that sun orientation is the most important single decision to be made, once you have settled in general where the house is going to be. This means both orientation as to time of day, which is described as an angle in the horizontal plane, and orientation as to day of the year, which is described as an angle in the vertical plane. Since the sun every day describes a different path across the sky, these angles change every day.

This is not all as terrifying as it may sound. You don't need a day-to-day set of angles. Close is close enough. You do need sets of angles taken, for a minimum, on or near June 21, September 21, December 21, and March 21. More is better. From these figures you can draw curves which will give you a close enough reading for any day and hour you care to name.

Let's suppose, however, that you, or your designer or architect, are trying to think about sun orientation on the strength of just one look at a proposed house site.

Not one person out of ten, whether he is selling land, buying it, or simply asking my advice on house-siting, has been able to tell me within thirty degrees one way or the other where south was. Three out of ten miss it by as much as ninety degrees, or one quarter of the compass. A few people have pointed straight west and sworn that was where the sun came up.

Given a map showing latitude and longitude, the time zones, and the services of a surveyor and mathematical astronomer, the sun angles for any given place can be figured out. This is a long and expensive task. The easiest way to get your sun angles is to take them yourself on the spot.

You can do it with two sticks, a tape measure, and a series of picnics at intervals over one year. During the first year after you buy your house site, here is what I want you to do. First, find south:

Drive a stake in the ground to some measured height. For convenience later, better make it forty-eight inches, if you are to build in feet and inches, or one meter, if you are to build in centimeters.

Every half hour or so through the day, and every fifteen minutes through the middle of the day, put a pebble or a twig at the end of your stake's shadow. The pebble which is closest to the stake is straight north. At least it's "sun north," which is all we care about now.

Next put a long, straight stick beside the vertical stake, straight down from its top and at right angles to the north-south line. This, of course, is pointing east and west, or anyhow close enough.

While all this has been going on, you will have kept a record of the time when each pebble was put down. Unless you are right in the middle of your time zone, the north-south line will not have occurred at twelve o'clock.

Measure the sun angles the way a carpenter does. You will be thinking like a carpenter when you use this information later. He measures, not the angle itself, but the distance out and over, or out and up. He can describe any line whatever in terms of all three; out, over, and up.

The "up" being fixed by the height of the stake--you can forget about vertical measurements and use your tape only on the ground--

measuring east and west from the north-south line, and north from the east-west line.

At the end of the day, you need keep nothing but a piece of paper with this information:

June 21	48-inch vertical stake	Standard time
7:30 A.M.	East 81"	North 3"
8:00	63"	19"
8:30	47"	32"
9:00	26"	37"

and so on.

When you have done this once in a while through one year, the sun has been brought under control. To answer a question about last winter, drive your stake again, measure out and over. A stick from that point leaning across the top of the stake is aiming right at where the sun was.

It's a great argument stopper. Says Mike to Mary, "Look, hon, you can't put the sundeck there. It'll be in shadow until way after lunch."

"Why, Mike, you remember that picnic with the Jenkins' last August, well, we got here at nine. I remember that because I forgot the paprika, and right then the sun was just over a clump of birches. You can't have forgotten that because Dick Jenkins decided he didn't like the kind of beer you brought."

"You know Dick, hon. He was just kidding about the beer. Anyway, he was transferred in July, so it was June you're thinking about. Anyhow, I put the ice chest under the second oak tree, the little one, and it must have been still in the shade by lunch."

"Well, you know best, Mike, but just now it comes to me it wasn't the Jenkins' at all. . . ."

Do yourselves a favor, and lay hands on your house site as early as possible. Then spend your time keeping records on your own property, rather than clipping pictures of someone else's property out of the magazines. There's a lot of fun to be had, regrets to be avoided, and money to be saved.

26. When to buy

Don't go land-shopping on Sunday afternoon. That's when everyone else does. In some states it happens to be illegal, but the Sunday land-shopper doesn't get sent to jail; he just types himself in the eyes of the seller.

The seller assumes that you aren't serious. His lips are smiling, to be sure, but his mind is turned off, worn by the Sunday streams of station wagons, their occupants best-clothed, high-heeled, child-burdened, traffic-weary, who seem to be there only because they couldn't think of any other way to kill off the afternoon.

Reviewing in one paragraph the stern warning of Section 24: go land-shopping in bad weather, at a time of year when nothing looks good unless it is good, and at a time of day and week when you and the seller will have a chance to get acquainted. Buying land is not like buying a refrigerator. It's more like getting married.

Having done everything right, having gone land-shopping in your old clothes on a reasonably rainy Tuesday morning, and having traded your money for an excellent piece of empty real estate, you should then study your land for two years before you build.

Not the least important reason for your deliberate approach is that you will have given yourself time in which to buy a multitude of things. There are many big and little things to buy before your house is even started. More to be bought before your house is complete. For most of these things there is a right time and a wrong time to buy.

You know and everybody knows that the truism of buying is to buy out of season, or simply, when other people aren't. Everybody knows this. Very few do it. That's what makes the truism true.

Did I say I was smarter about it than anybody else? Oh no. I know perfectly well that one week before the grass starts to grow the lawn-mower repair man is sitting in his shop, twiddling his thumbs and quietly starving. But when do I take my lawn mower to be serviced? Ah hah! One week after the grass starts to grow, of course. By then the line of lawn mowers stretches around the block.

On some things I have managed to smarten up a little. After all these years I can at least remember that Saturday afternoon is a poor time to get my hair cut.

I can remember, when building a house, to buy my lumber at a time when the loggers and saw-millers and lumber yards are hungry. Next to labor, the total expense for lumber will be your largest single cost.

Plumbing and fixtures are a big item too. We wash a lot nowadays. Talk to your plumber and plumbing supply man when they aren't busy.

Make your selections, pay a deposit, settle on a far away delivery date. They'll love you.

Roofing is another thing you can buy off season. It's a big item, but easy to pick out, easy to store when delivered. The price of roofing rises steadily through the builders' year, then drops back in winter and starts over again. Maybe you'll get it through the hardware store, lumber yard, or supply house. Tell the man what you want as far in advance as possible, and let him do the shopping. Don't you do the shopping. Pick out a trusted supplier and stick with him for as many purchases as possible from one source. He'll break his neck to see you get treated right.

When doing the actual building, remember that fast construction is inherently cheaper than slow construction. Buying materials is just the opposite. The more time you can take to round up the stuff, the cheaper it should be.

I don't really expect you or me or anybody else to do it this way all the time. We are humans, which means that our wisdom and patience are less than infinite. These words are no more than a hopeful push in the right direction, and I wish I were smart enough to pay attention to them myself.

27. When to plan

You bought, or will buy, a site because you have certain things, vague or well-defined, in mind. Your general planning actually began before the purchase of the site. Your specific planning should not begin until after your real estate has become real. From there on, you plan all the time, with major plans coming first and lesser ones later.

I suggested a fairly long courtship with your site. A better analogy would be a long honeymoon. This is the most fruitful planning time, when mistakes can be corrected with a word or a pencil stroke. You need time to worry about where to put your perennial border so that you can see it from the kitchen sink. Time to decide how to get a plow into the garden and where it is going to turn around.

Planning time is a fun time. You may never enjoy the rest of the marriage quite so intensely

as you did the honeymoon--I'm sorry, I mean the real house quite so intensely as the dream version. In dreams, neither the roof nor the faucets ever leak.

During the planning time, you work. "Work" is used here to mean play. You cut brush and trim the poplars. You get a forgotten apple tree back into blossom, and you sort which of those thorny things are briars to be cut and which wild roses to be pruned. The weed patch that used to be a plowed field is tilled, leveled, and seeded to clover. While you play, the major decisions, which at first seemed agonizing, turn out to be not so difficult after all.

The following un-Socratic dialogue may illustrate how the decisions come about.

Scene One: Mike, the assistant gardener, has just dug up a shovelful of loam and is standing there holding it.

"Where do you want this dirt?"

"Oh, any place."

"Where is any place?"

"Well, put it in the wheelbarrow."

"Where do I dump the wheelbarrow?"

"Over there."

"But hon, I'll just have to pick it up again and move it somewhere else."

"Let's use it to help plant the flowering crab-apple."

"What flowering crabwhattle?" Mike puts the shovel down.

"The one in the shrub order we gave the man last fall."

"Oh. Where's it going, hon?"

"Outside our bedroom window. I thought you'd like to look at it while you're taking your exercises."

"Say, I'm getting enough exercise now. Where was the bedroom the last time we looked?"

"Well, I thought you decided it ought to be close to the brook."

"Sure, hon, but the brook won't be worth a darn until it's dug out, and with the bedroom going that way instead of this way how can a back-hoe get at it?"

"Well Mike, if we decided . . ." Long pause while Mike puts the rest of the dirt in the wheelbarrow. "If we decided on the sedan instead of the convertible, would that be enough money to have the back-whatsit now, and then the dirt that comes out could go on the garden. Maybe?"

"It's a thought, hon. I'll ask him. Guess I'll dump the wheelbarrow over where you just said."

In this little story we are stumbling toward another axiom of house building: It is always cheaper to make major site changes before the house is built.

The extreme example of the failure to recognize this principle--and you'll laugh, but it happens often; people do build boats in basements and do saw off limbs behind them--is the case where the newly built house prevents doing the site work which had been planned. Something like this, for instance:

In this striking use of a beautiful setting, the owners made just one mistake. They built the house first. After that the boat bay had to be dug by hand, and every board, nail and sack of cement for the boathouse was carried through the living room and out the kitchen door.

This one is less extreme, but so frequent it hurts:

Let's say the gravel pile came from the basement excavation. Millions of people still dig basements, just to spite me. First they build the house, then, working in from the road, they polish up the lawn, the terrace, the garden. Two years later they want to get rid of the gravel pile, which by now is covered with briars and poison ivy. There are just four choices: one, make two thousand trips with a wheelbarrow; two, bring the trucks in and start over next year with lawn and garden; three, carry enough stones around by hand to make a rock garden; four, wait till it snows and sell the place.

Here's another. Tree surgeons make more money from this stunt than from their regular business:

The dead tree could have been removed for nothing before the house was there. Left until later, the bill came to several hundred dollars. Ridiculous, you say, but other folks do it every time.

Anything whatever requiring the use of heavy equipment can be done cheaper if you do it first.

The next step is to get in your slow growth planting, those trees and shrubs with which you plan to correct nature's inevitable imperfections. Wait, wait, wait, I seem to be saying. But not with tree planting. In doing your long-range planting early you will be years ahead. You can build a house a lot faster than you can grow a tree.

Nine years ago I planted a larch. It was three feet tall. Seven years ago, when it was five feet tall, it turned out to be in the middle of the driveway. I moved it. With fine brainlessness, I transplanted it directly under where the power line had to come through two years later. Five years ago, at seven feet tall, it could still ride in the wheelbarrow, but just, and I moved it again. After two mistakes (mine, not the larch's) it is now in the right place, twenty-two feet tall, growing lustily, and not far from being the prettiest single tree on the place.

The moral, if any, is that if I had waited to be sure exactly where to put it, there wouldn't be any larch tree there at all.

I deny having drifted off the subject. We are talking about When. In summary, the recommended order of events is buy early, plan early, dig early, plant early, and build later.

28. When as it affects you

When in the years of your life should you embark on the building of a house?

The answer can be provided only by you. I can help you a little, but not much. I don't know how old you are, how many children you have, how much money you make now or how much you may be making ten years from now. I don't even know what country you live in. I do know that you are more courageous and able than most, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this book.

I can point to a few guideposts which may help you decide. The first guidepost says, Get Going. All other things being anything like equal, the sooner you start the better. There are many reasons. Here are a few:

The cost of desirable land goes up faster than the cost of living.

The selection of desirable land goes down at an alarming rate. Most of the buyers I have talked to were anywhere from five to twenty years too late to get what they wanted. In consequence they had to take less, pay more, travel farther, or give up.

The cost of domestic construction also goes up faster than the cost of living. This is not an argument for buying rather than building. The price of any property, new or old, rises with the cost of new construction.

Paying rent does not accumulate any equity for you.

Your own muscle power can go nowhere but down as the years go by. Right now, whatever willingness you may have to heave, hammer, and dig is worth many dollars in the end result. You aren't getting any younger.

Here's the clincher: from your point of view the total effort required to build your estate must be divided by the number of years you have left to enjoy it. This simple calculation gives you your pleasure cost per year. One year of fun is worth any effort, if you think so, but more years are that much better.

The next guidepost seems to point the other way. It is labeled Money. The younger you are, the less time you have had to accumulate any. The older you get, the less time you have left to enjoy it.

We're all in the same box. Whether the calendar reads twenty or seventy, practically everybody has too little money and all of us have too little time. It is not the purpose of this book to tell you how to make money quickly. It might not be good for you, and I don't know how either, and if I did know the secret, I would keep it to myself.

My purpose is to help you make do with what time and money you have. I do not insist that you build a house at all. It may be the wrong time in your life. I do not suggest that you harness yourself to a housebuilding project, then spend the rest of your life doing nothing else and paying for nothing else, including interest charges spread over thirty years.

Back in Section 14 I suggested an extreme method of installment building, starting out with a house shell, one large room with bath, and going on from there. Some modification of this technique, depending on how hard up you are

and also how ready, willing and able you are, is one answer to the money dilemma.

Take what money you can reasonably spare and do what you can with it. Put the house dollar ahead of, let's say, the new car dollar or the fur coat dollar or even some of the dining out dollars. Then settle for something less than absolute completion and perfection on the day you move in.

If you will do these two things, my conviction is that the money problem can be licked, and you will have a decent place to live years sooner than you might think.

Lower on the Money guidepost is a sign which reads, "A dollar down and thirty years for the rest." This technique of acquiring a house doesn't seem like a bargain to me. Whether you pay rent or interest, neither contributes to your equity.

Still lower down, almost hidden in the grass, is a sign which reads, "Be sure of yourself." Money and interest charges can give you a hard time, but so can uncertainty. Better, perhaps, to rent a house or live in a trailer, if a major change looms in your life pattern.

Few young people go at one job and stick with it forever. It would pain me to think that you had closed the door on opportunity by tying yourself to a housebuilding project too soon. If, however, you are feeling strong and can see three or four years ahead, go to it. The experience will pay off, because just around the corner the next guidepost reads, in green letters--

"Build the first one."

Your first house will probably not be your last. Everyone starts out to build his dream house. It does not discredit dreams to admit that they are made of changeable stuff. Two tries is par for the course. Some folks build five or six houses and have more fun with each new dream as they learn from those gone before.

I think this is perhaps as good an argument as any for getting started early.

The last guidepost on When Street reads, "What about the children?" The right time is not, as is often said, "when the children are through school." By the time this comes to pass you've begun to slow down and the children have missed a lot of excitement.

If children thrived best in a stationary setting, the offspring of essentially migrant professions--teachers, preachers, army officers, and junior oil company executives--could hardly manage to survive.

I submit that children, as well as their parents, thrive on an occasional transplanting. They are hardy, adaptable, and interested. They will enjoy sharing the new house fun with you. They will enjoy a part in making their house grow up around them.

29. When to build

It was hard to deal with the personal question of When in your life to build. When in the year to build is easy. The carpenter knows exactly when. I am not talking about thousand-house builders, who work all year round. I am talking about one house. Yours.

Yours is the house that you want to build for the lowest cost possible; therefore keep the weather working for you rather than against you. It is expensive to move frozen earth, to pour concrete in below-freezing temperatures. Roofing doesn't lay well when it's cold, but has to be handled with extra care when it's hot. Rain is always a nuisance to builders, until the roof is up and they can work under it.

If you have more money than you need, you may declare that because the carpenter is being paid, he should work in any kind of weather. Certainly he will, but for an equivalent effort, the carpenter does more and better work when he is neither too hot nor too cold. Bad weather also means that the workmen need wind screens, sun screens, and special heating; that they have to spend expensive time covering materials, drying out wet lumber, or filling mudholes. These are costly diversions which do not contribute to the final product.

Here is the prescription for a day on which both carpenter and materials can give you most for your money. The weather will be fairly dry, mildly cloudy, with a light breeze, and the temperature between 55 and 65°.

The only thing that makes this prescription hard to follow is that everybody else is trying to build at the same time. The carpenter is working somewhere else.

On this ideal day, everyone wants him. Good-weather building seldom fits with the principle of off-peak buying. Where I live, for instance, late autumn is the ideal building time. Cool, dry, and pleasant but not too pleasant. In theory this time fits well with a program of getting the shell up and then working indoors through the winter.

In practice you never make it, because everyone else is trying to do the same thing. Carpenters, plumbers, electricians, masons, earth-movers, hardware stores, lumber yards, contractors--the whole force of labor and supply is dashing madly around saying yes to everybody and trying to keep everybody happy. Everyone wants to get finished up before the winter and no one quite does.

Obviously some compromise between good weather and good buying practice has to be found. In this compromise you can put human nature to work. Since no one ever gets things done as fast as he thinks he's going to, the time when he gets started to build is usually about two months behind the time he intended. There is a lag of two months between the best weather and the peak of building activity.

You will translate this phenomenon in terms of your own climate. In my part of the world, it takes us directly to early spring as the cheapest time to build. It's a little wet, to be sure, and a little chilly, but the leaves aren't out, the mosquitoes haven't arrived, the workmen are eager to get started, and the rest of the folks who intended to build in the spring aren't ready yet.

The happy compromise may be to plan for a start in the fall. Then with everything running four months late, it is suddenly early spring and away you go.

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